Use of various networks, including the Internet, has exploded in the last few years. Much of this is due to increased number of computer users who access various networks, a greater percentage of the computer users using broadband services, and proliferation of multimedia files being transferred. For example, it is common now for a computer user to transfer digital photographs, music files, and video clips that may each be several megabytes in size. To a lesser extent, in terms of number of files transferred, but not necessarily in the total number of bytes transferred, there are full-length videos that may be hundreds of megabytes in size. All this traffic may cause network congestion, and the result may be dropped packets.
A receiving network device may perceive dropped packets as holes and isles, where a hole may be one ore more sequential dropped packets and an isle may be one or more sequential received packets between two holes. In order to fill the holes, the transmitting network device may retransmit the dropped packets according to ACK messages that it receives from the receiving network device. The retransmission algorithm may often be based on “Reno” or “New Reno” algorithms.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.